Greetings from the center of America

Greetings from the center of America, originally uploaded by real_voodooboy.

Hey! We are momentarily uprooted from our swampy laze to spend our nation's glorious 234th with my wife's family in the well-coiffed outskirts of St. Louis. And by wife's family, I am a lucky rarity to happily consider them my family too.

We had beercan chicken, swam until the first round of fireworks lit up and I understand we are going to make a trip to one of Missouri's fine holiday munitions purveyors later. Bring the noise! Pictures at AMERICA o'clock!

whimsy or gravitas or something

Maya and I made another trip to the taxidermi-tastic and diorama-rific LSU Museum of Natural History and/or Science. Come along before it gets shuttered in the budget cuts!


Except the entrance is actually to your right in this photo

I won't go through everything and have some issues with safari activities, but nonetheless think one of these should be placed above every metal filing cabinet and office supplies closet. Lends the scene some whimsy or gravitas or something.




Click here for the rest of the photos.

let's boogie!

Greetings from the Piggly-Wiggly!

Peter Case, Wig!
The Fall, Reformation Post T.L.C.
Terry Manning, Home Sweet Home

This Peter Case, post-heart-surgery, what-is-a-boy-to-do-now, let's boogie!, epiphany blues record is tremendous, tremulous, temerarious. Not unlike the rock edges of Heartbreaker except by a guy with a literal broken heart. It's the first thing on my best of the second half of 2010 list, you know, the list that never gets published because it is the end of the year already. Birthday-next-to-Christmas situation.

Anyway, I'm being unabashedly promotional in an unsolicited manner; this record is great. DJ Bonebreak from X plays drums on it, if that helps sell it.


Peter Case, "Dig What You're Putting Down"

I knew I reviewed that Fall album when it came out but couldn't remember a thing about it. And they still are my favorite band but they came along after "favorite band" = full personal embodiment. It is a little my friend's kid getting into the Rolling Stones now - there are plenty of eternal footfolds by which to scale that crumbling mountain but mostly it is an exercise in skyhooks and slack ropes. This song's a corker.


The Fall, "Das Boat"

Terry Manning's CD got pushed on me at a CD store last September after talking about Big Star - Manning was a producer at Ardent and played in an early incarnation of the band. Manning also took one of the last living picture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Anyway, 24 hours or so from now, we'll be plowing through Memphis toward a weekend of Midwestern fireworks and familial pool mayhem, and this CD is atop a stack supporting the speaker I am listening to it on right now, so maybe that means something. Chris Bell plays on this, right after the aliens dropped off the first Moog in Memphis.


Terry Manning, "Savoy Truffle"

y'all have to go for me

Keiji Haino, The 21st Century Hard-Y-Guide-Y Man - Even Now, Still I Think
The BSC (Bhob Rainey + others), 23% Bicycle and/or Ribbons of the Natural Order (tweet for it)

Media Announcements: My article about the stunning Grand Opera House of the South in Crowley and the Elvis impersonators that perform there is up for perusing in this month's Country Roads. Also, I lay out my 10 favorite albums of 2010 so far in this week's Record Crate blog for 225.

Public Service Announcement: Hey Baton Rouge, out-thinking, free-noise-ish, saxophone alchemist Bhob Rainey is performing at the LSU School of Music Thursday night at 7:30 for free. I can't make it so y'all have to go for me. It might sound like this, and then it might not.


Bhob Rainey, "Unique States Part 3"

Awesomeness Announcement: Keiji Haino is pretty awesome at what ever instrument you let drift into his orbit. On the above record, he cracks open the Philsopher's Stone with a hurdy-gurdy.

acumen

Sign outside a Mediterranean place near my house.

Louie
Kim Richey, Rise
Tift Merritt, See You on the Moon
Beachwood Sparks, Once We Were Trees
Belle & Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress

I'm into the new Louis C.K. vehicle Louie. I don't want to fall in a Treme trap of praising a show's architecture early on only to find not a whole lot inside but a sitcom is sometimes improved by the lack of an arc.

Musically, I am trapped in the bookstore in that review I mentioned last night. I'm more than a little proud of the terrible story I pecked out in that post, if I say so myself. It felt like I did something there. I don't know what that says about my acumen as a self-editor.

Speaking of, I wonder if there ever a point in the making of the sign posted above that the designer thought, I might be clouding the message.


Tift Merritt, "Mixtape"

First we saw this ape

First we saw this ape standing in someone's yard.

Then, while taking in a Greek Salad at Zoe's, the big one that has a layer of potato salad under the salad, I was consumed with an overwhelming urge to hear Emmylou Harris' "Wrecking Ball." Like not there in the restaurant, because I had Maya with me and I try to not be one of those dads who is on his stupid phone all the time when he could be hanging out with his kid. I wrote an article about theses dads during a short stint at a parenting magazine and then slowly became one. Plus in the last week, she has been a total barrel of laughs to be around. I mean more so than usual.

Zoe's has these terrible paintings from some school project stacked up around the restaurant, probably in trade for some chicken salad sandwiches the restaurant provided that the kids did not even eat (crusts), thus becoming a zero-sum exercise for both parties. Maya asked if she could walk the perimeter and look at them and I thought, My chance!

I pulled up Rhapsody on my newly upgraded phone and it immediately crashed. Thrice it crashed. I reinstalled the app, noticing that slowness that everyone was complaining about on Twitter, then pulled it up and it took forever to find Emmylou Harris on search. Maybe it's Emmalou, I thought. Maybe this thing is junk. Maybe all the anti-Apple cranks are right, not for being anti-Apple but for being cranks and maybe my cheery techno-optomism crossed with my anti-consumerist no-complaint zen is just an olio of failure. She (Emmylou) finally showed up, followed by Maya, followed by our food. I added "Wrecking Ball" to my queue to listen to on the way home.

Rhapsody was acting like garbage, infinitely "Loading Track..." with that implied spinning wheel made out of radiating lines that secretly says I am not doing anything and you are watching me do it. Sometimes you can trick it by pausing and then pressing play and it starts up, or going back and forth between tracks, like the way the lady on that OCD show flips the lights on and off so that her kid won't get cancer.

(Sidenote: on one episode, a therapist tries to exposure cure a germophobe by going to a coffee shop and insisting they eat muffins in the bathroom, rubbing them along the bowl and setting them on the seat. The therapist accidentally dropped her muffin in the toilet water and to prove a point, fished it out and popped it in her mouth. The germophobe went from irrational nervousness to perfectly rational grossed-outedness as did everyone watching the show. I was hoping the woman would have involuntarily smacked the therapist as one might do a kid who suddenly decided to eat something that had just fallen in a public toilet.)

It finally worked and as we hit the roundabout by the Banana Republic, Emmylou's chimey little wonder kicked in and got to "I'll meet you at the wrecking ball."



It was the wrong song.

Maya asked if she was singing "I'll hit you with a wrecking ball" and I explained the double meaning of ball (orb; dance) used here and she shrugged. I feel the same way.

I wanted the Gillian Welch "Wrecking Ball"



a song I thought might be a cover of Emmylou's but in fact it was Emmylou who covered Gillian's "Orphan Girl," a fact I was reminded of by this brilliant and hilarious Pitchfork review of Gillian Welch's Soul Journey written as a play (the review, not the album) by William Bowers. Bowers is a contemporary writer (we've been in the same issue of the OA) of whose lyrical prowess I am sorely envious and man enough to admit it. Again. I'm gonna have to get his book All We Read is Freaks. Read this excerpt and weep.

Anyway, I was home already and didn't want to fool with my phone anymore and I wanted to tell this story to my wife, but really, who wants to hear a story like this? About iPhone apps not working? Picking the wrong song to listen to? McSweeney's doesn't even go there. Oh, but right before typing this up, I was reading something on the McSweeney's iPhone app about apes and it reminded me to show my wife the picture of the ape sitting in someone's yard. She laughed, "I wonder what it was originally leaning on." and I looked again because I hadn't noticed it was leaning on nothing until she said it.

whatever is going on

Lunch at the cafeteria, with a bit of orange drink peeking in from the top.

Allen Toussaint, Life, Love and Faith
Tindersticks, Falling Down a Mountain
Charlie Rich, Boss Man
Bee Gees, Cucumber Castle

Media Announcements: My interview with Joe Bonomo, author of 33 1/3's Highway to Hell and Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, is up at outsideleft, I break down the artists on Red Stick Sounds, a new compilation of Baton Rouge artists, in the July issue of 225 and, while I tend to keep the real job off this blog, a nice little article about the game design class I taught and will be teaching again popped up on the LSU homepage.

I have the makings of the world's greatest/worst soft rock mixtape going this afternoon. Whatever is going on in this video with the Bee Gees playing in the background would fit right in.


Bee Gees, "I.O.I.O"